By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
The name is difficult to argue with. The Child’s Voice Project. Who opposes children having a voice?
That rhetorical insulation is doing a lot of work — because beneath the branding sits a model that, in the specific cases where it matters most, doesn’t amplify the child’s authentic voice at all. It amplifies whoever controls the child’s environment. And in contested custody proceedings involving parental alienation, false accusations, or one parent’s systematic manipulation of both the child and the court, that distinction is not a minor technical concern. It is the entire ballgame.
CVP is a private nonprofit that places “child advocate attorneys” in contested custody cases in Southern Maryland, and is expanding. Its model originated in North Carolina and is explicitly designed for national replication. Understanding what it actually does — and what it structurally cannot do — matters now, before it reaches courts near you.
Two types of attorneys. One critical difference.
Maryland Rule 9-205.1 recognizes three types of attorneys that can be appointed to represent children in custody proceedings: a best-interest attorney, a child advocate attorney, and a child’s privilege attorney.
The best-interest attorney conducts an independent investigation — interviewing parties, reviewing records, consulting with mental health professionals — and then advocates for what they conclude serves the child’s interests. Crucially, they are not bound by what the child says they want. If a judge believes the child’s expressed preference does not align with the child’s actual best interest, the judge can disregard it, and the best-interest attorney’s independent assessment remains in the record.
The child advocate attorney, by contrast, is bound to the child’s stated position. Like any attorney representing a client, their job is to convey what the child says they want and advocate for that position before the court. They are explicitly not authorized to override the child’s expressed wishes with their own judgment.
CVP operates in the advocate attorney lane.
The distinction is consequential and almost entirely absent from CVP’s public-facing materials, which describe their work as ensuring “every child is heard” without explaining that “heard” means “the child’s stated preference is carried to the court by a credentialed attorney, regardless of how that preference was formed.”
The alienation problem
Parental alienation — the process by which one parent systematically manipulates a child to reject or fear the other — is the most direct challenge to the advocate attorney model, and CVP’s framework handles it poorly.
An advocate attorney who faithfully carries that voice to the court is not giving the child agency. They are giving the alienating parent a credentialed mouthpiece.
When a child has been subjected to months or years of denigration, exposure to litigation, coached narratives about the rejected parent’s supposed danger or indifference, and an environment that rewards alignment with the alienating parent, that child has a “voice.” It is a voice that says what it has been trained to say. An advocate attorney who faithfully carries that voice to the court is not giving the child agency. They are giving the alienating parent a credentialed mouthpiece.
CVP’s own website lists “parent-child contact problems and resist-refuse dynamics” as a recognized case category — buried near the bottom of their framework, below domestic violence, coercive control, child maltreatment, LGBTQIA+ youth issues, and parental substance use disorders. “Resist-refuse dynamics” is the clinical term for a child’s refusal of contact with a parent, which encompasses alienation-driven rejection. The fact that CVP mentions it at all is notable. The fact that it appears last, without the same structural attention given to the other categories, reflects an ideological ordering that has real consequences in the field.
That is not a minor implementation gap. It is a structural flaw in the model.
There is no publicly available CVP training protocol describing how their attorneys are supposed to distinguish a child’s genuine, independently formed preference from a coached or environmentally conditioned one. There is no description of what happens when a CVP attorney suspects the child’s expressed wishes reflect manipulation rather than authentic voice. There is no protocol for communicating those concerns to the court in a way that doesn’t simply become another instrument of the alienating parent’s strategy.
That is not a minor implementation gap. It is a structural flaw in the model as applied to the specific cases — high-conflict, one-parent-dominant, manipulation-heavy — where CVP is being deployed.
The false accusation context
In cases where one parent has made false or exaggerated allegations of abuse, the same problem manifests differently.
A child raised in a household where the other parent has been characterized as dangerous, abusive, or unsafe — whether or not any formal finding supports that characterization — will often reflect those beliefs when interviewed by an advocate attorney. Children are not lie detectors. They are not necessarily conscious that they have absorbed a narrative. They have simply lived in an environment where one version of reality was reinforced daily.
An advocate attorney trained in trauma-informed practice and ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) frameworks — which CVP’s approach emphasizes — is primed to receive the child’s account of a “scary” or “unsafe” parent as credible trauma disclosure. The training framework itself creates confirmation bias in exactly the wrong direction. A child describing fear of a parent who has done nothing wrong, in language they absorbed from the primary-custodial environment, will present to a trauma-trained advocate attorney as a child whose fear should be taken seriously and carried to the court.
This is not a failure of individual CVP attorneys. It is what the model produces when applied without alienation-specific training and without investigative authority.
The due process problem
Here is what parents on the receiving end of a CVP appointment are dealing with: a privately funded attorney, trained according to a private organization’s proprietary framework, with access to their child and the ear of the judge, whom they cannot cross-examine, whose training materials they cannot review, and whose appointment they had no mechanism to vet or contest.
The CVP attorney is not a witness. They cannot be deposed. They are an officer of the court in a role that was designed for individual judicial appointments, now being filled at scale by a national organization with a defined ideological agenda and no public accountability structure.
Maryland Rule 9-205.1 was not designed with this in mind. The rule contemplates a judge exercising discretion to appoint an individual attorney in a specific case. It does not contemplate an external organization operating a pipeline of trained attorneys, expanding county by county, with its own research agenda, its own definition of child-centeredness, and its own outcomes targets — and doing all of this inside state judicial proceedings without legislative authorization or judicial oversight of the organization itself.
In Maryland, the three firms currently supplying CVP-trained attorneys are Williams, McClernan & Stack, Delaney Stafford, and Fanning Law — all based in Southern Maryland. Parents whose cases receive a CVP appointment have no say in which firm or which attorney is assigned, and no access to the training that attorney received before entering their case.
The settlement speed problem
CVP cites case settlement speed and trial diversion as primary outcome metrics. Fewer cases go to trial. Cases resolve faster.
This is presented as evidence of success. It may be evidence of something else entirely.
Faster resolution is a benefit to courts. It is not inherently a benefit to the parent whose position was structurally compromised from the start.
In high-conflict custody cases where one parent has more leverage — more financial resources, de facto primary custody, or a court record already tilted by false allegations — faster settlement rarely means more equitable resolution. It often means the less-resourced or less-legally-positioned parent accepted a worse outcome rather than face continued litigation. Adding a child advocate attorney who is carrying the primary custodial parent’s household narrative to the court does not neutralize that pressure. It adds to it.
Faster resolution is a benefit to courts and to case management metrics. It is not inherently a benefit to the parent whose position was structurally compromised from the start.
The governance question no one is asking
CVP is a sponsored project of the Goodnation Foundation, a New York-based fiscal sponsor whose reported funders include Arnold Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Borealis Philanthropy, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies — organized progressive philanthropy, not a neutral pass-through. CVP’s leadership is employed by Panorama Global, a Seattle-based nonprofit founded by a former Gates Foundation director that has received more than $12 million in Gates funding. Neither organization has any prior footprint in family law or parental rights.
CVP has no standalone board, no Maryland-specific accountability structure, and no independent evaluation of its pilot results. Its own funders are not publicly disclosed. The organizational layers — sponsored project of one nonprofit, staff employed by another, attorneys drawn from three private firms — create a structure in which accountability for what happens inside Maryland courtrooms is effectively distributed across entities with no Maryland presence and no Maryland accountability.
CVP’s stated vision is to “set a new standard for child agency that will stand alongside historic milestones such as child labor regulation, universal public education, and juvenile justice reform.” That is not a modest institutional ambition. It is a systemic reform agenda being executed county by county inside state courts, without any state debate about whether that agenda is appropriate, accurate, or in the interest of the families it affects.
What parents — fathers and mothers — should demand
This is not an argument against children having representation. In genuinely chaotic cases where both parents are problematic and a child needs an independent voice, something like the advocate attorney model has legitimate value.
But that is a narrow use case. When CVP’s model is deployed broadly in contested custody — as expansion necessarily means — it reaches cases where one parent is a bad-faith actor and the other is a victim. In those cases, the advocate attorney model does not protect the child. It protects whoever has shaped the child’s narrative.
These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum transparency that any organization operating inside state judicial proceedings owes to the public.
Before this model reaches more Maryland courthouses, parents have standing to ask:
What is CVP’s specific training protocol for identifying parental alienation and coached preference? What happens when a CVP attorney suspects the child’s stated wishes reflect manipulation? What are CVP’s outcome metrics disaggregated by custody result — specifically, does the child’s expressed preference, as carried to the court by a CVP attorney, correlate with outcomes favoring primary residential parents? Who funds CVP, and what ideological commitments do those funders carry? What independent oversight — not CVP’s own quasi-experimental self-evaluation — exists for this program?
These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum transparency that any organization operating inside state judicial proceedings owes to the public those courts serve.
The child’s voice matters. So does the question of whose hand is on the amplifier.
Father & Co. covers parental rights and family court accountability with a gender-neutral editorial standard. This analysis is based on CVP’s publicly available materials, Maryland court rules, and reporting by The Daily Record.
Sources: The Daily Record, “Pilot program gives MD children a say in custody cases,” Ian Round, June 16, 2026 (thedailyrecord.com) — primary news source for program scope, geography, the advocate attorney framing, and Kratovil-Lavelle quotes. Child’s Voice Project website (childsvoiceproject.org) — sourced extensively: the “common case issues” framework and the ordering that buries resist-refuse dynamics at the bottom; the “quasi-experimental design” self-evaluation language; the courts page language describing attorneys as advocating “just as they would for any adult client”; the mission page vision statement comparing CVP’s ambition to child labor reform and universal public education; and the three Maryland law firm partners. Maryland Rule 9-205.1 and the Maryland Guidelines for Practice for Court-Appointed Lawyers Representing Children in Cases Involving Child Custody or Child Access (mdcourts.gov) — source for the three attorney types (best-interest, child advocate, privilege), the distinction between advocate and best-interest mandates, and the court appointment framework. Goodnation Foundation, Influence Watch (“Goodnation,” influencewatch.org) — source for fiscal sponsorship structure, the $66M+ figure, and the funder network. Panorama Global, panoramaglobal.org and Influence Watch (“Panorama Global,” influencewatch.org) — source for Fitzgerald’s nine-year Gates Foundation tenure, the $12M+ in Gates funding to Panorama, and Panorama’s stated programmatic focus areas. Goodnation Fiscal Sponsor Directory (fiscalsponsordirectory.org) — corroborating source for Goodnation’s structure and fee model.
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